The numbers are even bleaker for Nintendo - its year of Wii U sales have now been trounced in a weekend by both next-gen machines. More people bought a PS4 and a copy of Knack over the weekend than bought a Wii U at any point over the past year and new release Super Mario 3D World.

If not even a Mario game can save a Nintendo console, you know something's up. People, Nintendo is in deep, deep trouble.

Nintendo put themselves precisely in this position as soon as they announced the original Wii. It was that point in which they said they were focusing on casual gamers rather than the hardcore gamers. However, there are several issues they didn't take into account before making this incredibly short-sighted decision:

- Casual gamers are fickle and will switch to another platform such as tablets or Facebook games at the drop of a hat
- Since casual gamers do not focus as much on graphics, it was going to be much harder to convince them to buy a new console
- When the hardcore gamers moved on to other consoles, they weren't going to look back
- When the hardcore gamers moved on, many of the major third-party publishers didn't bother releasing their titles on the Wii
- The Wii focused on party games and completely missed the boat on online gaming

While Nintendo still has billions in the bank to fund their next step, they have a big uphill battle to fight. Console gamers have given up on Nintendo and so have the publishers. Nintendo now needs to convince both sides that they can produce a console that gamers will buy and publishers can sell large quantities of games. At this point, the market has almost been reset. Just like BlackBerry lost marketshare and developers after iOS and Android disrupted the market, Nintendo is practically starting from square one - without gamers and publishers.

The simple fact is that if things could be like they were and Nintendo could make a console with substantial power and gain enough third-party developers back that I could own a single system and get all of the AAA games the other consoles have AND Nintendo titles, I would easily go with Nintendo's console. Unfortunately, Nintendo is still chasing gimmicks such as tablet controllers. Nintendo: get back to your roots and produce a console for gamers with no gimmicks and content for older gamers (you know, the ones you got addicted to games back in the 80s).

both get back to their roots and exploit obvious opportunity. Sony and MS seem to both be in for grabbing more control. To me that means being indi friendly and more network able, perhaps even allowing people to run their own servers. Screw the EA type money grabs. They will get sales of first party titles if people buy the consoles. Nintendo doesn't have to have the fastest hardware but it also shouldn't be offensively slow like the wii was.